This Night’s Foul Work

X

ON THE MORNING OF 21 MARCH, THE COMMISSAIRE TOOK THE TIME TO greet every tree and little branch on his new route to work, from the house to the office. Even in the rain, which had not stopped since that hailstorm over Joan of Arc, the date deserved effort and respect. Even if, like this year, Spring was late, perhaps on account of some previous engagement. Or maybe she had slept in, as Danglard did one day in three. Spring is capricious, Adamsberg thought, you can’t expect her to arrive punctually on the morning of 21 March, when you think of the astronomical quantity of buds she has to deal with, not to mention all those larvae, roots and seeds, things you can’t see but that must certainly take up a huge amount of her energy. By comparison, the non-stop work of the Crime Squad was negligible, a joke really. A joke that gave Adamsberg a good conscience while he took his time walking through the streets.

As the commissaire strolled at a leisurely pace across the large shared hall known to the staff as the Council Chamber, to place a sprig of forsythia on the desks of the six female officers, Danglard came rushing to meet him. The commandant’s shambling body – which seemed to have melted like a candle, wiping out his shoulders, making his torso shapeless and his legs crooked – was not suited to rapid walking. Adamsberg always watched with interest when he tackled long distances, wondering whether one day he would lose one of his limbs in the process.

‘We’ve been looking for you,’ puffed Danglard.

‘I was paying homage, capitaine, and just now I’m paying my respects.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, it’s after eleven.’

‘The dead aren’t going to quibble over a couple of hours. My appointment with Ariane isn’t until four o’clock. She sleeps in all morning. Be careful not to forget that.’

‘It’s nothing to do with the deaths. It’s the New Recruit. He’s been waiting for you for two hours. This is the third time he’s made an appointment to see you. And when he turns up, he’s left sitting on a chair as if you couldn’t care less.’

‘Sorry, Danglard, I had an important rendezvous that was fixed a year ago.’

‘With?’

‘With the Spring. She’s touchy. If you forget her, she’s liable to go off and sulk. Then it’s no good trying to catch her. But the New Recruit will be back. Anyway, which New Recruit are we talking about?’

‘Oh for God’s sake, the one who’s replacing Favre. Two hours he waited.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Red-haired.’

‘Good, that makes a change.’

‘Actually his hair’s dark, but it has ginger stripes in it, sort of black-and-tan effect. Odd-looking, I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘All the better,’ said Adamsberg, putting his last flower on the desk belonging to Violette Retancourt. ‘If we have to have New Recruits, best they should be really new, out of the ordinary.’

Danglard thrust his gangling arms into the pockets of his elegant jacket and watched as the massive Lieutenant Retancourt put the little yellow flower in her buttonhole.

‘This one seems rather too out of the ordinary, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Have you read his file?’

‘Dipped into it. At any rate he’s here on probation for six months, whether we like it or not.’

Before Adamsberg could open his office door, Danglard held him back.

‘He’s not there any longer, he’s gone off on duty to the broom cupboard.’

‘He’s guarding Camille? Why’s that? I asked for experienced officers.’

‘Because he’s the only one who will put up with that damn cubbyhole on the landing. The others are all fed up with it.’

‘And since he’s new, the others have landed him with it.’

‘Correct.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since three weeks ago.’

‘Send Retancourt. To protect Camille. She can stand anything, even the broom cupboard.’

‘She did offer. But there’s a problem.’

‘I don’t see any problem that would hold Retancourt up.’

‘Just the one. She can’t turn round in the space.’

‘Ah, too big,’ said Adamsberg pensively.

‘Too big,’ Danglard confirmed.

‘It was her magical size that saved my life, Danglard.’

‘Maybe so, but she can’t fit into that cupboard and that’s that. So she can’t take over from the New Recruit.’

‘OK, capitaine, I get it. How old is he, this New Recruit?’

‘Forty-three.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘From what point of view?’

‘Aesthetic, seductional.’

‘There’s no such word as “seductional”.’

The commandant ran his hand over the back of his neck, showing his embarrassment. Sophisticated as Danglard’s mental processes were, he was, like all men, reluctant to comment on the physical appearance of other men, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. Adamsberg, on the other hand, really wanted to know what the man looked like who had been allowed to sit for three weeks on Camille’s landing.

‘What’s he look like?’ Adamsberg persisted.

‘Quite good-looking,’ Danglard admitted reluctantly.

‘Not my lucky day, then.’

‘You could say that. It’s not Camille that I’m worried about, though, it’s Retancourt.’

‘She’s susceptible?’

‘So they say.’

‘Quite good-looking in what way?’

‘Built like a tree trunk, crooked smile, melancholy expression.’

‘Certainly not my lucky day,’ commented Adamsberg again.

‘Well, you can’t go round killing all the other men in the world.’

‘One could perhaps go round killing all the ones with melancholy expressions.’

‘Conference time,’ Danglard announced abruptly, looking at his watch.

Danglard was of course responsible for giving the name ‘Council Chamber’ to the large room in which they held meetings, in this case a general assembly of the twenty-seven officers in the squad. But the commandant had never owned up to it. Similarly he had planted the term ‘conference’ in the minds of his fellow officers, instead of ‘meeting’ which he found off-putting. Adrien Danglard’s intellectual authority carried such weight that everyone accepted his dictates without questioning their appropriateness. Like a medicine taken in full confidence, the new words that the commandant introduced were absorbed without qualm, and were so rapidly integrated that they became irreversible.

Danglard pretended not to be involved with these small alterations to the language. To listen to him, these slightly pompous terms had risen up through the ages, impregnating the buildings like ancient moisture sweating out of the walls through the cellars. A perfectly plausible explanation, according to Adamsberg. Why not? Danglard had replied.

The conference was due to discuss the two murders at La Chapelle and the death of a sixty-year-old woman from a heart attack in a lift. Adamsberg made a quick head count. Three were missing.

‘Where are Kernorkian, Mercadet and Justin?’

‘In the Brasserie des Philosophes,’ explained Estalère. ‘They’ll be finished in a minute.’

The number of murders with which the Serious Crime Squad had had to deal in two years had not yet extinguished the astonished cheerfulness that beamed out of Estalère’s green eyes. He was the youngest member of the team. Tall and thin, Estalère had attached himself to the ample and indestructible Violette Retancourt, whom he worshipped with a near-religious passion and from whom he rarely strayed more than a few feet away.

‘Well, tell them to get up here quickly,’ ordered Danglard. ‘I don’t suppose they’re finishing a philosophical debate.’

‘No, commandant, just their cups of coffee.’

As far as Adamsberg was concerned, whether it was called a conference or a meeting mattered little. He was not suited to collective discussions and was disinclined to distribute tasks. These general briefings bored him so intensely that he could scarcely remember having followed a single one from beginning to end. Sooner or later, his thoughts would leave the table, and from far away (but where?) meaningless fragments of sentences would reach him, about taking names and addresses, questioning suspects, putting tails on people. Danglard watched the degree of absent-mindedness in the commissaire‘s brown eyes and nudged him when it reached critical level. As he had done just now. Adamsberg recognised the signals and returned to earth, emerging from what some would term a state of blankness but which was for him a vital safety valve, allowing him to explore uncharted directions on his own. Pointless ones, Danglard opined. Yes, pointless, Adamsberg agreed. They were coming to a conclusion in the case of the sixty-year-old woman, thanks to some good detective work by lieutenants Voisenet and Maurel, who had smelled a rat and discovered that the lift’s mechanism had been tampered with. The arrest of her husband was imminent, and the drama was reaching its conclusion, leaving in Adamsberg’s mind a trail of sadness, as always when he encountered everyday brutality at a turn on the stair.

The investigation into the murders at La Chapelle was currently classified as following up a couple of routine underworld killings. It was now eleven days since the tall black man and the hefty white man had been discovered lying dead, each one in a cul-de-sac, the first in the Impasse du Gué, the second in the Impasse du Curé. It had now been established that Diala Toundé, aged twenty-four, had sold trinkets and belts under the bridge at the edge of the Clignancourt quarter, while the white man, Didier Paillot, known as La Paille, twenty-two, tried to engage passers-by with his card tricks in the main alleyway in the Flea Market. The two men did not apparently know each other, and their common denominator was that they were both massively built and had dirt under their fingernails. On account of which, Adamsberg, flying in the face of reason, had obstinately refused to pass the case over to the Drug Squad.

Questioning residents in the buildings where both men lived – labyrinths of cold rooms, and non-functioning lavatories in dark stairwells – had produced nothing, nor had visits to all the cafés in the sector from the Porte de la Chapelle to Clignancourt. Both mothers, who were devastated, had claimed that their boys were the best of sons, one showing off a nail-clipper and the other a shawl which they had been given only the month before. Brigadier Lamarre, overcome with timidity, had returned to base very upset.

‘Their old mothers,’ said Adamsberg. ‘If only the real world was like the dreams of old mothers.’

A nostalgic silence hung for a moment over the conference, as if each person present was remembering what the dream of his or her old mother had been, and whether he or she had lived up to it, and if not by what margin the reality had fallen short.

Retancourt had come no nearer than anyone else to fulfilling the dreams of her old mother, who had hoped her daughter would be a blonde air hostess, calming and charming airline passengers; a hope that her daughter’s height of one metre eighty and weight of a hundred and twenty kilos had ruled out after puberty, leaving only the blonde hair – and an ability to calm people which was indeed out of the ordinary. Retancourt had made a small inroad, two days earlier, into the obstructions that seemed to be blocking this inquiry.

After a week of getting nowhere, Adamsberg had taken Retancourt off the almost finished case of a family murder in an elegant dwelling in Reims and had sent her to Clignancourt, rather as one might try a magic potion as a last resort, without being sure what to expect from it. He had sent Lieutenant Noël with her, a hefty, broad-shouldered and leather-jacketed character with protruding ears, a man with whom he did not get on well. But Noël was, he thought, suitable for protecting Retancourt on this difficult assignment. In the end, and he really ought to have expected it, it was Retancourt who had come to Noël’s rescue, after their inquiries in a café had degenerated into a brawl that spilled out into the street. Retancourt’s massive intervention had calmed down the group of angry men and she’d pulled Noël free from the three individuals who seemed bent on making him eat his birth certificate. Her talent for resolving matters had impressed the bistro owner, who was getting tired of the fights that often broke out in his establishment. Forgetting the rule of silence in the Flea Market district, and possibly moved by an admiration of the same order as that felt by Estalère, he had come running after Retancourt to get something off his chest.

Before making her report, Retancourt untied and redid her short ponytail, the only trace, Adamsberg thought, of her childhood shyness.

‘According to Emilio – that’s the café owner – it’s true that Diala and La Paille weren’t normally seen together. Although they operated only about five hundred metres apart, they weren’t working the same zones in the market. The geographical divisions of the quartier mean that various tribes who shouldn’t mix are kept apart, or there might be trouble and reprisals. Emilio says that if Diala and La Paille got involved in something together, it wouldn’t have been on their own initiative, it must have been through some other person, a stranger to the ways of the market.’

‘An outsider,’ said Lamarre, for once abandoning his usual reserved approach.

Which reminded Adamsberg that the timid Lamarre came from Granville – from Lower Normandy, therefore.

‘Emilio thinks that this stranger might have chosen them because of their brute strength: for some raid, or perhaps to intimidate or beat someone up. But at any rate, whatever it was turned out well, because two days before the murders they turned up for a drink in his bistro. It was the first time he’d ever seen them together. It was nearly two in the morning, and Emilio wanted to shut up shop. But he didn’t dare say no to them, because the pair of them were well launched – they were big lads and they’d already had way too much to drink.’

‘We didn’t find any money on them, or in their lodgings.’

‘Maybe the murderer took it back from them.’

‘Did Emilio hear what they said?’

‘He wasn’t particularly listening, he was just going to and fro, clearing up. But these two were alone in the café, they weren’t taking any precautions, and were laughing and shouting at the tops of their voices. In the end, he had to tell them to shut up, they were shouting loud enough to waken the dead, never mind his mother upstairs. That just made them fall about laughing all the more, they nearly pissed themselves. Emilio gathered that they’d had some work that was very well paid, and had only taken an evening. No mention of any fight or anything. It was on the other side of Paris, in Montrouge, and their boss had just left them there once the job was done. Montrouge, Emilio’s sure about that. He fixed them some sandwiches and they finally pushed off at about three o’clock in the morning.’

‘Perhaps they had to deliver or collect some heavy consignment,’ suggested Justin.

‘It doesn’t sound like drugs to me,’ Adamsberg said, obstinately.

The previous night, in Normandy, he had refused to answer the nth call from Mortier. He could have told Mortier that one of the mothers swore blind that her son, Diala, didn’t touch drugs. But for the head of the Drug Squad, the fact that someone had a black mother at all was enough to create a presumption of guilt. Adamsberg had managed to obtain from his divisionnaire a delay before he had to hand over the file, and the deadline was in two days.

‘Retancourt,’ said the commissaire, ‘did Emilio notice anything about their hands, or their clothes? I’m thinking mud or earth.’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Call him.’

Danglard announced a break. Estalère jumped up. The brigadier had a passion for things that interested nobody else, such as memorising personal preferences. He brought out twenty-eight plastic cups on three trays, putting in front of each officer his or her favourite drink – coffee, chocolate, tea, large, medium or small, with or without milk and sugar – without making a single mistake. He knew that Retancourt liked her coffee black and without sugar, but that she liked to have a spoon to stir it with. He would not have forgotten the spoon for the world. Nobody knew why this chore gave such innocent pleasure to Estalère, who had something of the medieval page-boy about him.

Retancourt came back, holding her phone, and Estalère pushed towards her a cup of sugarless coffee and a spoon. She smiled her thanks, and the young man sat down happily at her side. Of them all, Estalère still did not seem to have fully grasped that he was working on serious crimes, but went about in the team like a happy teenager, glad to be one of the gang. He would have slept there if he could.

‘Yes, they had dirty hands, stained with earth,’ Retancourt announced. ‘Shoes as well. After they had gone, Emilio had to sweep up dried mud and bits of gravel they had left under their table.’

‘What’s the idea?’ asked Mordent, poking his head up from his stooping shoulders, like a great grey heron sitting at the table. ‘Had they been digging up a garden or something?’

‘Digging in the earth, at any rate.’

‘Should we start looking in all the parks and waste ground in Montrouge?’

‘But what would they have been doing in a park? With something heavy?’

‘Go and take a look anyway,’ said Adamsberg, giving up and suddenly losing interest in the conference.

‘Perhaps they had a trunk to move somewhere?’ suggested Mercadet.

‘What the heck would they be doing with a trunk in a garden?’

‘Well, something else that’s heavy,’ said Justin. ‘Heavy enough to need two big guys who wouldn’t ask too many questions.’

‘But the job must have been so important that someone wanted to shut them up afterwards,’ Noël pointed out.

‘Digging a hole, burying a body,’ suggested Kernorkian.

‘If you were going to do that,’ said Mordent, ‘you’d hardly hire two strangers, would you? You’d do it on your own.’

‘A heavy object, then,’ suggested Lamarre mildly. ‘Bronze, stone, a statue, perhaps?’

‘What would you bury a statue for, Lamarre?’

‘I didn’t say I’d bury a statue.’

‘Well, what would you be doing with a statue?’

‘I’d have stolen it from some public place,’ said Lamarre after thinking for a moment. ‘I’d get it taken somewhere to hide it, then I’d sell it. There’s a market for stolen works of art. Know how much you’d get for a statue off the façade of Notre-Dame?’

‘They’re all nineteenth-century copies,’ Danglard interjected. ‘You’d do better to try Chartres.’

‘OK, know how much you’d get for a statue from Chartres Cathedral?’

‘No, how much?’

‘How should I know? But thousands, I bet.’

Adamsberg heard only fragments of this discussion – park, statue, thousands – until Danglard nudged him.

‘What we’ll do is start from the other end first,’ he said, sipping his coffee. ‘Retancourt will go back to Emilio. She’ll take Estalère who has good eyesight, and the New Recruit because he’s in training.’

‘The New Recruit’s in the broom cupboard.’

‘Well, we’ll get him out of there.’

‘He’s been in the force for eleven years,’ said Noël. ‘He doesn’t need lessons like a schoolkid.’

‘Some training in working with all of you, Noël, isn’t the same thing.’

‘What are we supposed to be looking for at Emilio’s?’ asked Retancourt.

‘The remains of the gravel they left on the floor.’

‘But commissaire, it’s almost a fortnight since the men were in the café.’

‘What sort of floor is it? Tiled?’

‘Yes, black and white.’

‘Of course,’ said Noël, with a shout of laughter.

‘Ever tried to sweep up gravel? Without losing a single piece? Emilio’s bistro won’t be a palace. With a bit of luck, some of that gravel will have got into a corner and stuck there, waiting for us to find it.’

‘So if I’ve got this right,’ Retancourt said, ‘we’ve got to go up there and look for a little bit of stone?’

Sometimes Retancourt’s old hostility to Adamsberg surfaced, although their relations had been transformed, during a previous case, by an exceptional episode of close bodily contact which had welded the lieutenant and the commissaire together for life. But Retancourt was one of the positivists, and considered that Adamsberg’s mysterious directives obliged members of the squad to operate too much in the dark. She reproached the commissaire with insulting the intelligence of his colleagues and failing to make the effort to clarify for them where he was heading, or to throw them a gangplank across the marshes of his thoughts. For the simple reason, as she well knew, that he was incapable of it. The commissaire smiled at her.

‘You’ve got it, lieutenant. A patient little white stone waiting in the dark forest. It will take us straight to the crime scene, just like the stones in Tom Thumb.’

‘That’s not quite right,’ pointed out Mordent, who was a specialist in myths, legends and indeed horror stories. ‘The pebbles help Tom Thumb to find his way back home, not to the Ogre’s house.’

‘OK, Mordent. But what we want to find is the Ogre. So we’re doing it the other way round. Didn’t the six other boys end up in the Ogre’s house anyway?’

‘Seven,’ said Mordent pedantically, raising seven fingers. ‘But if they found the Ogre, it was precisely because they couldn’t find the pebbles.’

‘Well, we’re going to look for them.’

‘If these pebbles exist,’ added Retancourt.

‘Of course.’

‘And if they don’t?’

‘They do, Retancourt.’

And on this firm statement from Adamsberg’s private Mount Olympus, to which no other mortal had access, the conference on La Chapelle ended. There was a scraping of chairs, the plastic cups were thrown away and Adamsberg called Noël over.

‘Noël, stop bellyaching,’ he said gently.

‘She didn’t need to rescue me. I’d have got out of it by myself.’

‘Three guys with iron bars? Come off it, Noël.’

‘I didn’t need Retancourt to go playing the US cavalry.’

‘Yes, you did. There’s no dishonour in it just because she’s a woman.’

‘I don’t consider her a woman. She’s the size of an ox, for God’s sake – she’s a freak of nature. I don’t owe her.’

Adamsberg rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand, as if testing his shave, the signal of a crack in his phlegmatic façade.

‘Let me remind you, lieutenant, why Favre had to leave this outfit, after his persistent troublemaking. Just because his place is empty, there’s no need for someone else to try and fill it.’

‘I’m not taking Favre’s place, I’ve got a perfectly good one of my own, and I’ll do things my way.’

‘Not here, Noël. If you do things your way and they clash with ours, you’ll have to do it somewhere else. With the more limited members of the force.’

‘Limited? Did you hear Estalère? And Lamarre burbling about statues? And Mordent with his blessed Ogre?’

Adamsberg consulted his two watches.

‘I’ll give you two and a half hours to go for a walk and clear your head. Go down to the Seine, take a long look at it and come back.’

‘I’ve got reports to finish,’ said Noël, hunching his shoulders in protest.

‘You didn’t understand me, lieutenant. That’s an order, and a mission. You go out, and you come back in a sane frame of mind. And you’ll do it every day if necessary, for a year if necessary, until looking at the sea-gulls over the river tells you something. Just go now, Noël, and keep out of my sight.’